Publications

This paper develops arguments for a family of temporal log-linear models to represent spatio-temporal correlations among the spiking events in a group of neurons. The models can represent not just pairwise correlations but also correlations of higher order. Methods are discussed for inferring the existence or absence of correlations and estimating their strength. A frequentist and a Bayesian approach to correlation detection are compared. The frequentist method is based on G 2 statistic with estimates obtained via the Max-Ent principle. In the Bayesian approach a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Model Composition (MC3) algorithm is applied to search over connectivity structures and Laplace’s method is used to approximate their posterior probability. Performance of the methods was tested on synthetic data. The methods were applied to experimental data obtained by the fourth author by means of measurements carried out on behaving Rhesus monkeys at the Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University. As conjectured, neural connectivity structures need not be neither hierarchical nor decomposable.